India has 66 resident billionaires whose combined wealth of roughly $244 billion is equivalent to more than a fifth of the country’s $1.1 trillion gross domestic product.66 people control a country of a billion people. 66.
Yeah...I'm kind of having a hard time being shocked by this revelation. What democracy in this world isn't actually run by a well-monied/well-connected sub-set?Well, Iceland. Particularly since the economic collapse they ended up kicking their bankers out of power.
I mean really. Look at how the rich live in any of the BRICs compared to the US and come back to me about how the rich in the US live an equivalent lifestyle or have a similar level of relative political impact.What are you talking about? I mean, can you give some examples? The only thing I can think of is that they tend to have a lot less money. How many billionaires are there in Brazil compared to the U.S? Maybe in Russia they have more power. In China power is held by cliques in the party, not by rich industrialists. Not that there isn't overlap but the very wealthy don't run the government yet (maybe in a few decades the Chinese government will be fully corrupted)
Its not simply a question of lower labor costs. Its about the mutability of laws, flexibility of tax regimes, the value of personal connections, etc, etc.I see plenty of examples of those kinds of thing for the super-rich in the U.S as well. Look at the 'flexibility of laws' with regards to Goldman Sachs, for example.
How the rich benefit from those things in the developing world compared to the developed world even at its absolute worst are on two totally different scales.
Saying that some number of people own wealth equivalent to 1/5 the GDP is like saying someone owns a lake that holds 1/5 the amount of water that flows through a river each year.Yeah. But it's a big lake. For example, the Mississippi river ejects 600 thousand cubic feet of water per second into the ocean. That's 25 cubic miles or almost a quarter of Lake Erie's volume.
'Brothers and sisters, for too long, we have cowered in the shadow of our oppressors,' he began. 'But we will be downtrodden no longer. Let them face this one fact: there are many more of us, than there are of them!' A sigh of assent ran through the room, quickly falling away to silence as they listened for more, ears pricked that they might hear every revolutionary word. 'Tonight, my brothers and sisters - the battle begins!' A sharp collective intake of breath, the rustle of heads turned, glances exchanged, nods acknowledged. The speaker waited, letting the idea sink deep into his audience, stiffening the spines that had been bent for so long.Should a country the size of India, with such a low median level of income, be run by a small clutch of billionaires for their own advantage? Of course not. Nor should a country the size of China be run by a small clutch of party politicians for their own benefit. Nor should Russia be run by a bunch of autocrats for their own benefit, and so on. And none of them are, completely: powerful elites are in competition with each other to some degree, and while some of them seek to maximize their own benefit by reducing the benefit of as many others as possible, as quickly as possible, others seek to maximize their own benefit by increasing the welfare of others, hoping that a loyal clientele will prove more useful than engineering the disorganization of their opponents.
'The battle...' he resumed, 'of the mice against the elephants!'
Try conducting any official business in India without bribing someone. Go ahead, I dare you. They've implemented zillions of extra steps in an apparent attempt to limit corruption, but all they've really done is create a zillion extra people who need to be bribed.Well, low-level corruption is a problem, but it's somewhat orthogonal to wealth inequality. Wealth inequality in the U.S. is very high and equivalent to 3rd world countries (as opposed to most other developed countries). Sure, you might have trouble bribing a police officer but what about an SEC investigator or politician? Not that difficult
Want to get a passport? Just to pick one corruption hoop at random: be sure you've bought the right kind of stamp paper, from the right shop, or the clerk will "lose" your application. To pick another hoop: be sure you've accidentally left a few hundred rupees in your folder, or it may again be lost. Better pray you put enough in there, or the last guy in the paperwork chain will get pissed, and then you're lost again. But not too much of course, lest they think you're trying some kind of sting!
This may seem like strong medicine. But in fact, while necessary, it is insufficient. The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.--
Oversize institutions disproportionately influence public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their power from being too big to fail. Nationalization and re-privatization would not change that; while the replacement of the bank executives who got us into this crisis would be just and sensible, ultimately, the swapping-out of one set of powerful managers for another would change only the names of the oligarchs.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think that means you can only argue that the US doesn't compare to the BIC companies.With China at 46 and the U.S at 45 they are pretty close.
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Maybe the U.S. should invade, and bring freedom to the people of India!
posted by sonic meat machine at 7:13 AM on March 1, 2011 [10 favorites]